An unheeded message from the past

From the 1961 Operation Coffee Cup Campaign: then-private-citizen Ronald Reagan speaks out against socialized medicine. (There is no video because this was an LP (record) sent out by the American Medical Association.)

“Now back in 1927 an American socialist, Norman Thomas, six times candidate for president on the Socialist Party ticket, said the American people would never vote for socialism. But he said under the name of liberalism the American people will adopt every fragment of the socialist program. One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.” [Note: Norman Thomas is the grandfather of Newsweek reporter Evan Thomas.]

“But let’s also look from the other side, at the freedom the doctor loses. A doctor would be reluctant to say this. Well, like you, I am only a patient, so I can say it in his behalf. The doctor begins to lose freedoms; it’s like telling a lie, and one leads to another. First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then the doctors aren’t equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him you can’t live in that town, they already have enough doctors. You have to go some place else. And from here it is only a short step to dictating where he will go. This is a freedom that I wonder whether any of us have the right to take from any human being.” [Note: This provision was included in “Hillary Care,” assigning doctors regionally, assigning them geographically. It went so far in Hillary Clinton’s health care bill as to assign what specialty they would learn.]

“You and I can do a great deal. We can write to our congressmen, to our senators. We can say right now that we want no further encroachment on these individual liberties and freedoms and at the moment the key issue is, we do not want socialized medicine. Write those letters now; call your friends and tell them to write them. If you don’t, this program, I promise you, will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow, and behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country until one day, as Norman Thomas said, we will awake to find that we have socialism, and if you don’t do this and if I don’t do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”